“Be careful!” I called after him and he chuckled as he headed back out into the corridor before calling back to us.
“You should head back to see Orion – the Heirs will return at any moment and Darius is all worked up wanting to go kill things,” he said.
“So what’s new?” I replied.
His laughter carried away from us and I forced my sleepy ass to sit up as the others got out of the pool, Geraldine paddling her seashell to shore while singing a ditty about a salacious salmon.
They got dressed and dried off and we headed back to Orion and Darcy’s room, Sofia peeling away to go find Xavier and Tyler as they had plans to fly with the herd in the clouds this afternoon.
I followed Darcy inside with Geraldine and found Orion sitting cross legged in the middle of the bed, his hair looking like he’d run his fingers through it a hundred times and his nose so deep in the pages of that book on rocks that he could probably taste the glue that bound it.
“Shit dude, you look like you’ve been cheating on my sister with that hardback,” I teased and he looked up at us with a grin as he laid the book down in front of him.
“Do I need to break her spine?” Darcy teased as he shoved his messed up hair out of his eyes with a deep laugh.
“I think I’ve found something,” he said, beckoning us closer and pointing to a piece of text which was absolutely not written in English. “Look here, it talks about the twelve Zodiac Guild stones.”
“Golly gosh nuts,” Geraldine breathed.
“Oooh,” Darcy cooed, moving to sit on the bed with him as I dropped into a chair. “What does it say about them?”
“Not a lot,” Orion sighed. “It’s only this small passage really. But it implies that the stones were once held by the heads of twelve powerful families, each of which represented a single star sign. Then I remembered a passage I’d read in this book-” He turned and grabbed one of the many books which lay on the bed behind him and flipped through the pages of the dusty tome as carefully as he could before holding a handwritten page out for us to see. “This is an account of prophecies which were foretold in the last few hundred years which may or may not have come to pass – basically any prophecy that a Seer of note was gifted from the stars which wasn’t about events in their lifetime. I went through a stage of being obsessed with finding old prophecies and figuring out what they’d been referring to and whether or not it came to pass as a boy, so-”
“We get it, you had books for friends as a kid. But why does that equal you looking like you might make a mess of your pants at any moment?” I interrupted, seeing a whole series of reminiscence about his childhood reading habits in my future if I didn’t get him back on track. Darcy looked like she was into his lust for books, and I was kinda wanting to step out of the room before they descended into some sort of book orgy that I seriously didn’t want to have any awareness of.
“Right, yeah, so this is a prophecy which is almost four hundred years old and it says; ‘Reuniting the stones of the Zodiac Guild will mark the dawn of a new reign.’”
Orion looked between my sister and I with a wide grin and Geraldine shrieked before throwing a hand to her forehead and collapsing in a heap.
“Holy shit, Geraldine!” I cried, diving out of my chair and rolling her over as I pushed healing magic into her body, wondering what the hell had just happened.
“Are you okay?” Darcy asked in concern as she leaned in close too and Geraldine began to murmur something beneath her breath.
“The time is nigh, the time is nigh, the time is nigh…”
“What?” I asked, looking to Orion in alarm as he stood over us. But before I could freak out and start wondering if she was having a vision of her own, Geraldine leapt to her feet and thrust her arms into the air, an explosion of noise bursting from her throat as she cast that voice amplification spell thing on herself and made her words echo throughout the entire Burrows.
“THE TIME IS NIGH!”
“Jesus!” I clapped my hands over my ears and Darcy winced violently as Geraldine burst into tears, thankfully ending the spell before dropping to her knees before us.
“We must reunite the stones and mark the dawn of your reign, my queens,” she gasped between sobs and my frantic heartbeat finally began to calm as I realised she was just having an A.S.S. episode.
“You scared the crap out of us, Geraldine,” Darcy scolded as Orion shook his head and moved back to his precious books.